welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Friday, June 20, 2014

ADVERT FOR WHAM! NO 1



Joining other bloggers in celebrating 50 years since the first issue of WHAM!, I thought I might add my penny’s worth of trivia by showing the advert for WHAM! No. 1 which I found in EAGLE AND SWIFT with that same cover date (20 June 1964, Vol. 15 No. 25).


There is also an ad in the next week’s issue but it is the same that you can find in WHAM! No. 1, only larger and therefore more impressive (EAGLE was a tabloid sized paper then), check out both versions below:


12 comments:

  1. Interesting stuff, Irmantas. I actually scanned my pages at 150%, so that must be around Eagle size or bigger.

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  2. P.S. Bigger, actually. having just looked at your illustration again.

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  3. The first advert says "on sale next monday" so I suppose that means the exact release date for #1 was 15th June.

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    1. I asked this question on Lew’s blog and hope he or someone else will be able to explain things to me because I’m having a hard time understanding the way publishers dated their comics in the UK. The issue of EAGLE with the same cover date as WHAM! No. 1 said it was going on sale next Monday, but if both comics had the same cover date, presumably they’d have gone on sale on the same day or thereabouts, wouldn’t they? How come EAGLE which had the same cover date as WHAM! No. 1 advertised it as something that was coming out next Monday, although presumably they were in shops side-by side? A week later EAGLE ran the ad of the free gift in WHAM! No 2 but it’s the same ad that can be found in WHAM! No. 1 that came out in the week before… To make it more confusing, they said WHAM! came out every Tuesday and EAGLE – every Wednesday. And to make it even more confusing, in his book A Very Funny Business Leo Baxendale remembers that the day when the first issue of WHAM! went on sale was a Sunday. June 20 was a Saturday in 1964 …

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  4. Ooer, that's a tough one, but I'll try and explain as best I understand it. Nowadays, comics are usually dated a week ahead of when they go on sale, to give them a full week's shelf-life before the next issue comes in (as you know). It seems 'though, that at one time, some comics were dated for the weekend, regardless of what day of the week they went on sale. So if a comic came out on Wednesday 15th, it was dated 18th (Sat) - as it was if it came out on Monday or Tuesday. Also, if I recall correctly, sometimes a comic would say 'every Wednesday', but it wouldn't come out 'til the Saturday. Whether, in that instance, it was dated for the subsequent Wednesday or Saturday, I no longer remember. That's probably still confusing, but I took a shot at (most of) it.

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    1. So do you think it would be right to assume that WHAM! No. 1 came out on June 15th which was Monday?

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    2. Difficult to say, Irmantas. It says 'Every Tuesday' on the cover, but sometimes a comic was available a day before the one stated, so it could well have been on sale on the Monday. Equally 'though, it might have been on sale on Saturday 14th as some comics did (I think) come out on Saturday regardless of what the day it said on the cover. I know at some stage, Odhams changed the day their comics came out (or the day on the cover it said they came out) because readers were getting confused and perhaps even missing issues because of the discrepancy between the day on the cover and when the comic actually came out. Also, to confuse matters further, I believe some newsagents had their own days for putting out new issues, regardless of whether they'd come in a day or so before. (For example, if it came out on Saturday, but said every Wednesday on the cover, the newsagent might wait until Wednesday before putting it on sale.) Someone might be able to give you a definitive date based on distributors' records, but that's about the best I can do 'off the cuff' and based on my own experience.

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  5. Sorry, to answer your question slightly more directly, Monday 15th is a good assumption as #1 was dated 20th. However, Tuesday 16th or Saturday 13th (not 14th as I said in my previous answer, because I got 1964's date confused with today's, which is the 21st and not the 20th) are possibilities unless there's specific information somewhere that definitely rules them out. What makes it more difficult is that comics were actually published up to a fortnight before they were sent to the shops, so there must've been instances when some shops got them either sooner or later than the norm. Any of that any help? If so, could you explain what I just said?

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  6. Tell you what then - just assume it was Monday to make things easy. (Sometimes simple answers are best.)

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  7. Blogger Phil Rushton said...

    If it's any help I've posted an advert from the Eagle dated June 13th on Lew's thread on the Comics UK forum:

    http://comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=148&t=6155&p=80090#p80090

    As for the following week's ad I'd guess it should have read 'every Monday' instead of 'next Monday''. For the record comics nearly always arrived in the shop ahead of the supposed 'on sale' date - sometimes several days beforehand if you lived near to a distributor, though a few newsagents chose to treat it as an official embargo.

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    1. Phil, yes, I have seen your post and the advert you’ve shown, thanks for sharing. It didn’t help me understand their publishing schedule or the way they dated their comics but it definitely made me want get hold of a copy of that issue of Eagle :))

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